“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It should be obvious by now that in a large measure all of the selves and approaches I’ve delineated in these essays simply represent Seth playing around semantically, as he tries to get various portions of his ideas through our heads at certain times. All is one, basically, as he knows—and can feel—far better from his vantage point than we can from ours. (Yet, “Our lives and deaths are now,” Jane wrote in Chapter 10 of God of Jane, quoting herself from her own “psychic library.”)

Some of our other books contain more information on how Jane grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. Her father died in 1971, when he was 68. Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn’t seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. I didn’t urge her to do so, either. For my part, I’d always felt distinctly uneasy in Marie’s presence on the few occasions we met.

A moment ago, I referred to the way all involved with my wife could agree upon a course of probable activity. There are as many possibilities—and probabilities—as one can think of. I can hardly begin to list them all here. In Framework 2, for example, Marie, pregnant with Jane, could have decided with her daughter-to-be upon certain sequences of action to be pursued during their lives. Or in Framework 2 the two of them could have cooperated upon such a decision before Marie’s birth, even. If reincarnation is to be considered, their disturbed relationship this time might reflect past connections of a different yet analogous nature, and may also have important effects upon any future ones. Additionally, Jane could have chosen the present relationship to eventually help her temper her reception of and reaction to the Seth material, making her extra-cautious; this, even though she’d seen to it ahead of time that she would be born with that certain combination of fortitude and innocence necessary for her to press on with her chosen abilities. She could have made a pact ahead of time to “borrow” certain strong mystical qualities from her maternal grandfather, who was part French Canadian and part Canadian Indian (specific tribe unknown by us), and with whom she strongly identified as a child. And Jane’s resolve, her will that, according to Seth, “is amazingly strong” (in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 713th session for October 21, 1974), may buttress the understanding and determination of one or more of her counterparts in this life; she may meet (or have met) such an individual; another may live across an ocean, say, with no meeting ever to take place in physical terms.

Granted that our species’ best human understanding of “the mystery of life” and of the universe is exceedingly inadequate, still Jane and I do not think that nature is totally objective, indifferently cruel, or simply uncaring, as science would have us believe. (We also have deep reservations about the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” dogmas, but this isn’t the place to go into those subjects.) Far more basic and satisfactory to us are the intuitive comprehensions that this “nature” we’ve helped create is a living manifestation of All That Is, and that someplace, somewhere within its grand panorama, each action has meaning and is truly redeemed. We are not dwarfed. How could we be? For if, as I wrote earlier, Jane and I agree with the ancient idea that “all seeming divisions reflect portions of a unified whole,” we also think that in some fashion the whole is enclosed within each of its parts. Science calls the idea holonomy, but Seth has been saying the same thing for years without ever mentioning the word. Jane didn’t even know it.

Considering the views of Seth, Jane, and me, reincarnational and counterpart existences and their ramifications may enter in as portions of such a refining process as we attempt to search out the dimensions of consciousness. This may be true whether or not we believe in past and future lives, and/or counterparts, yet I can see no way such postulated manifestations can be “proven” at this time.